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Saturday, January 9, 2016

Trying out a PS/2 keyboard after decades

When my wife spilled water on my G15 keyboard, I bought a cheap keyboard to replace it. Despite wanting to buy a mechanical keyboard, knowing that I would have to carry it with be back to Sri Lanka and knowing that it would wake my kid up if I used the PC after he went to bed, I had to postpone it. It really was a cheap keyboard, that some of the keys had already become too stiff to press, which made my decision to throw it out before leaving Japan so much easier.

I was thinking of buying a Rs. 250 keyboard (do they sell them anymore?) when I arrived at home. But luckily, my dad had two PS/2 keyboards lying around in addition to the USB keyboard that he had hooked up to his PC. I have no clue as to how they PS/2 keyboards happen to be there.

Dad's PC doesn't have a PS/2 port, but ironically my PC has. And it is not rocking a gaming motherboard that come with a PS/2 port for increased compatibility with legacy gaming gear some people are reluctant to replace. Despite not being plug and play, PS/2 port doesn't use polling thus are more responsive than USB keyboards, which can also be beneficial for gamers.

But the first of the two keyboards I plugged in, acted erroneously. It would lock up some keys and never release. It was not usable.

Thankfully, the second keyboard worked. It is made by Logitech, so it should be well designed.

Sadly I am busy these days, so I cannot play games to see if a PS/2 keyboard works better than a USB keyboard when gaming. I'll probably never know, because the mechanical keyboard than I am planning to buy in the near future will come with a USB cable. (Some niche products supports both,